2015 was a marvellous year for Team Katusha’s Norwegian rider Alexander Kristoff. He was arguably the most dominating rider in the early stages of the spring season. Looking back, the Norwegian summed up, “I started really well in the Classics and I was 2nd in Milan-Sanremo, I’d hoped to win that and then when I won Flanders. That week I’d won almost everything apart from the time trial in De Panne. We won the Schledeprijs after and yeah, we won a lot that certainly helped then for the rest of the season,” Kristoff told media outlet Pezcyclingnews.com.

Emulating such successes will obviously be difficult for both the rider and the team. When asked about his plans for the season that is just getting under way, Kristoff said that the objective is to try and claim another Monument in the early weeks of the spring campaign.

“I can try to win two Classics like John [Degenkolb]. For me I always go best in Sanremo and in Flanders, I was struggling a bit during Roubaix, but I will try again for sure. I hope I can grab one at least, it’s not easy to grab one each year, but that’s the goal and for some years it’s not possible, but I hope not for next year.”

Originally, Kristoff had planned to participate in this year’s Giro d’Italia but apparently the team has other plans to globalize the Katusha brand, which means that the Norwegian will ride the AMGEN Tour of California instead.

“I’ll be going to California. We have some business in the US and Katusha wants to become more visible and commercial. They want to see Katusha as more of a brand and that’s why it’s becoming more global for this year. This year I think we’ll do more races in North America.”

Despite the absence of Luca Paolini, who was thrown out of last year’s Tour de France after testing positive for cocaine, Kristoff is confident that the team is strong enough to be in contention for the upcoming spring races citing the purchase of Michael Mørkøv from Team Tinkoff as an important factor.

“We don’t have Luca Paolini for the classics this year, but Michael Mørkøv can fill his spot and maybe in the classics, I don’t know if he’s stronger, but he could certainly be very helpful to me and maybe in the sprints he might even be a step up from Luca. He doesn’t have a lot of experience but he’s come from a track background and from seeing him before in the sprints he is a great addition to our lead out. Then apart from that we have the same team as last year, so Marco Haller and a few other guys so I think Alexander Porsev as well. I don’t know if they will let him in with us though because the directors and federation wanted Porsev, because he was normally the fastest Russian, to race for himself so he would be racing in other races and also the Russians need some points for the UCI races, so I don’t really know his program. But they will figure it out, he’s a strong guy, he raced with me a few years ago in the Tour, but I think we’ve got a really strong team. The Classics team is more or less the same as last year and we were one of the strongest teams there, so I think it’s good for this year as well.”